Handicapping the Alms Race : Charity Seekers Are Losing Their Appeal Due to Increasingly Aggressive Tactics

IT HAS ALWAYS BEENmy policy to give money to those who ask for it in the street. One doesn’t call them beggars anymore, because they are not professionals like those said to plague the streets of Calcutta; they are simply fellow citizens who have fallen through the cracks and are temporarily in need of money to buy food, cigarettes, wine, crack or shoes.

Lately, however, I find myself ignoring these mendicants, however pitiful their appeals. I avoid their rheumy eyes, their open palms, their shabby clothes. I hurry past them, not even shaking my head.

I might attribute my stone-cold reaction to some of the artless ruses that have been tried on me. One man approached me with an empty gallon wine jug and asked for a dollar to buy gas for his stranded car, which was nowhere in sight. Another held out his palm with six pennies in it--a suggestion that no contribution would be too small. The pennies looked new, as if they had just been purchased at a bank.

But such transparent devices are not really what has turned me cold. By nature I am an easy touch; I always feel wretched after I have denied a petitioner. What is it, then, that has turned me from a giver into a stiff?

It might be that I think the problem of homelessness and poverty has grown too big to be palliated by dropping a handful of loose change in a few palms; but how am I helping to palliate it in a larger and more organized way?

Where is my star in the President’s “thousand points of light”?

I have been chilled, I suspect, by the tidal wave of appeals for contributions to one cause or another that reach our house daily, either by mail or telephone. There are hundreds.

In the beginning, when our bank balance first exceeded our debts, we began making small contributions to this cause or that, whichever seemed worthiest or appealed to us for some emotional reason.

It was $25 here and $25 there; altogether they did not add up to much. But one kind deed soon led to another pitch; evidently charities exchange mailing lists, the way that vagrants used to carve symbols on back fences of houses where the wives had given them a handout. The appeals began to snowball. Our mailbox was stuffed daily with envelopes with exterior messages, often in large red letters, that cried out for our sympathy. “HELP A STARVING CHILD!” or “SAVE THE DESERT TURTLE!”

The telephone calls usually came at dinner time, just when the callers guessed that we would be home. Sometimes the calls were from Washington or Philadelphia or New York, a fact that the caller emphasized, evidently on the old theory that one is galvanized by a long-distance call.

Soon our total contributions grew to a rather sizable amount. It made a notable deduction on our income tax. Yet we did not feel as if we were really helping anyone. Could $25 here and $25 there really be felt? Could it really feed a starving child? I thought it was more like putting one more penny in that beggar’s hand.

I hate to complain about this, because each appeal in itself is probably worthy. One likes to help diseased children and endangered animals, and mothers who are mad about drunken drivers, but finally one seems to be sinking in a sea of charity, simply unable to reach out and help another single drowning soul.

We are not, however, going to stop trying to help, but we have to be more selective and give a larger amount to one cause instead of dissipating our largess among many. We will try in a smaller way to emulate Walter Annenberg, who gave $50 million to black colleges; now that’s a contribution that the beneficiary can feel .

I am going to examine each appeal, though it will take hours. If we give $25 a month to a little Ethiopian girl who will know our names and write letters to us, how will that make her little friends feel, those without rich pen pals in America? That’s the sort of question we’re going to ask ourselves.

Of course, we will go on contributing to the Northeast YMCA. After all, what Christian guidance I got as a boy came from the Whittier YMCA. We also have numerous other sentimental favorites, but we’re spreading it pretty thin. We may just save up until we can give somebody $50 million.

But I don’t feel so much overwhelmed as guilty. With so much need, we ought to be helping more. The next time I encounter that man with a handful of pennies, I’m going to give him a quarter. But I’m not going to be a sucker for that guy with the gallon jug and the empty gas tank.

There has to be a limit.